My answer to "life, the universe and everything"

Tag Archives: Blogging

With the long 4th of July Weekend, I thought it was time for my yearly site refresh. After upgrading to WordPress 3.0 (which has a number of advanced features like Custom Post Types and Multiple Sites installations), I decided to make two major cosmetic changes to the site.

I decided to change the site’s theme to Thirty Ten, a three-column version of the new WordPress default theme, Twenty Ten. Like all of the times I change themes, the old theme is still pretty good, but I just felt the need to experiment with a new design. I especially like that asides have been given their own style and that it’s easy to place my own header images (which I hope to do in the coming weeks).

Since I recently joined up with an online advertising company, I wanted to understand more about the business. So I reactivated my Google Adsense account, and decided to place ads on my site and feed. I had resisted putting ads on my site since I first started it (which when I think about it seems odd, since I was making less money then I do now), but it felt right to try this out. We’ll see how this experiment goes.

My latest social media projects for the Los Angeles Urban League have been two blogs. One is targeted to adults who want to follow news about the Los Angeles Urban League. The other is a youth-orientated blog for the Youth Center. I’m currently not writing them, but rather helping with the build out and features of the blog. This is the easiest way to move the agency in a more 21st century direction.

Lorelle on WordPress, who gave the Kicking Ass Content Connections talk at Wordcamp, sent out a free copy of her book Blogging Tips: What bloggers won’t tell you about blogging to conference attendees. I got my copy this past weekend and of course I’ve been reading it for the past few days. I’ve been looking for a simple book that described the basics of blogging to present to others, as well as give me some ideas on how to improve my blog (got to find the right header images, among other things). However, while I know this book was meant to be general in terms of blogging (and thereby make it more for novices and help it stand up for the future), I couldn’t help but wonder if there couldn’t be more specific tips like plugins for WordPress, Movable Type, or Firefox to make some of the recommended things like XML sitemaps. The general approach works, though, and therefore makes Blogging Tips a recommendable tome for the would-be-blogger.

Spend less time on coursework, because unless you’re going to graduate school, your grades don’t matter. And you don’t need to go to grad school to be a journalist. This route will leave more time for you to start blogging in college and jump into the work world with a strong following already established (plus a public record that you can write and report the news).

The Wordcamp conference has come and gone (I know it was a couple of weeks ago and I just now blogged about it) and all I can say is I had a blast. It was nice to be able to meet the faces behind some of the blogs I follow like who this Matt guy who created WordPress or that Lorelle who gives so many tips are anyway. Thanks to my employers, Los Angeles Urban League, for paying the accommodation and travel fees.

Thanks to my job at Urban League, I’ll be headed up north to San Francisco for the Wordcamp 2007 conference. Looks like it will feature a number of great speakers on the schedule. I won’t be liveblogging, but hopefully I’ll have a recap when I return.

Lifehacker has a great guide on Tumblr and Tumblelogs. It’s basically makes blogging even easier with no writing, just collecting what you see from the web. Wonder if I can get some of my friends to do this instead of typing everything into AIM profiles.

If your intention, as a blogger, is to have your content and your thoughts distributed as widely as possible, then reserving all your rights to your content is counterproductive. A more effective way of distributing your content and still retaining some control over how your content is distributed is using Creative Commons licenses